Scoop – 24.com blogs integrates with Afrigator to join ‘Afrosphere’

Published by Charl Norman on Feb 24th, 2009, No Comments

The continent’s top blog platform has officially joined the wider African blogosphere, otherwise known as the Afrosphere. Having integrated 24.com’s blogging engine with Afrigator – Africa’s leading social media aggregator and directory of online content published and consumed by Africans – 24.com bloggers can now join this uniquely African community with a single click.

The new feature gives users the opportunity to not only gauge the popularity of their blog within the different 24.com brands (Wheels24, Women24, Sport24, news24 etc.) and the 24.com environment, but also in South Africa as well as the rest of Africa. According to the largest survey of South African bloggers conducted last year, almost 40 percent of local bloggers use the 24.com blog platform.

“Adding the country’s largest blogging community to Afrigator, effectively puts 24.com bloggers out into the wider world and lets them discover fellow bloggers, make new friends and generally contribute toward the African zeitgeist,” say Justin Hartman, MD and co-founder of Afrigator. “Providing bloggers with statistics that were previously unavailable to them, the integration also gives individual users the chance to see how their blog resonates within the 24.com network of websites, as well as with audiences outside of South Africa.”

“By opening the window to the World Wide Web a little wider we are giving 24.com bloggers a new way to engage with other African and South African bloggers and nudging them into the mainstream of this vibrant new medium,” says Alistair Fairweather, Social Media Manager at 24.com. “The blogosphere is all about open democracy, personal expression, discovery and debate. At 24.com we’ve come to recognise that a commitment to openness will help us to serve our users better and improve our Web 2.0 capabilities.”

According to “Speak Up!” – a 2008 census of the South African blogosphere conducted by 24.com – approximately 60 percent of bloggers publish online to express themselves or have fun; with more than half of bloggers making one to five posts weekly. While the bulk of bloggers’ inspiration comes from personal experiences (48 percent), the other top sources include local and international media sites and media releases (24 percent), and local and international blogs (14 percent). Currently, only about five percent of bloggers in South Africa claim to have a monthly audience of more than 10 000.

Screen shot – 24 Blogs on Afrigator

We previously wrote about Afrigator here, here, here, here and here.

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